The second lesson from history is how quickly such
measures can be accepted as necessary, even “natural.” That ordinary people of
any ethnicity or nationality can partake in and support evil actions at any
time is not news to historians. The blithe assurance of top advisers like
Stephen Miller and senior bureaucrats like Kirstjen Nielsen who devise cruel
policies to suit the needs of the system they’re working within, and implement
them seemingly without thought, recalls Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”
More shocking is that many border patrol agents appear not only to be following
orders but, according to a recent ProPublica report, have paraded their own
racist, misogynistic, and sadistic tendencies in Facebook posts. That the Trump
administration has announced new nationwide raids by ICE agents recalls the
kidnappings and roundups by nineteenth-century slave-catchers and federal
marshals.
The out-group mentality is always a danger, but
there are still individuals who, regardless of race and ethnicity, do not
accept or support their government’s unjust and inhumane policies. If the
history of slavery and the fight against it has taught us something, it is that
racial proscriptions and divisions suit those who seek to dehumanize and
exploit people they construe as the other. For this reason, the interracial
nineteenth-century abolition movement can provide valuable inspiration to those
involved in today’s efforts to provide humanitarian aid to migrants and
refugees and to resist the threatened descent into authoritarianism,
mass atrocity, and inhumanity.
The 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act required
Northern free states to return runaway slaves to Southern slaveholders,
enforcing the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution. By the turn of the
nineteenth century, free blacks and mostly Quaker abolitionists resisted the
implementation of the fugitive slave law by forming humane societies to prevent
the kidnapping of free blacks, as well as fugitive slave rendition. Northern
states such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York passed personal
liberty laws guaranteeing the due process of law and trial by jury for suspected
fugitives.
The plight of today’s “Dreamers” and citizens and
legal immigrants married to undocumented immigrants is comparable to the status
of runaway slaves who married free blacks and raised children in free states.
The prosecutions of those rendering aid to migrants
and refugees across Europe and America demand that we extend anew our moral
imaginations and recommit ourselves to universal human rights and
democracy. The abolitionists’ protests against the fugitive slave
laws, which deprived large groups of people of their liberty and criminalized
those who offered assistance to them, should be an inspiration in our dismal
times.
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